With floodwaters receding and the body count rising, the Coast Guard officer in charge of the federal government's Hurricane Katrina relief efforts met Saturday with local officials in New Orleans to improve coordination. Vice Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard chief of staff, said he met with the presidents of eight parishes in the New Orleans area to discuss "the unity that is going to be needed to move this effort forward." Those at the meeting discussed "a single coordinating mechanism so I could take all those different forces that are flowing into a parish and make sure they were being put to the highest priorities," Allen said. He declined to describe specifics of the plan to reporters but said, "I think we know how to move forward from here." Allen said the discussions were "frank and open." One goal, he said, was to better coordinate moving people to temporary shelters once they are evacuated and their immediate needs met. In addition, he said, the effort to recover bodies was improving so the victims could be documented, families notified and the bodies transported. The house-to-house search for bodies and survivors in New Orleans is moving at a deliberate pace. One recovery team accompanied by a CNN crew on Saturday covered three blocks in three hours, wading through the city's toxic floodwaters.
